


Bianca

by lit103



Series: AI [2]
Category: Tintin (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 06:01:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3639399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lit103/pseuds/lit103
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sequel to the wildly popular <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/3545564">“Have/Have Not,”</a> the Tintin fic that took AO3 by storm!</p><p>“Cuthbert, he knows about me. He saw—he saw everything.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bianca

When Tintin shows up at the door of Calculus’ laboratory late that night, Calculus beckons him inside like he’s been expecting him. “There you are,” he says. “What happened up at the house? I heard a bottle breaking…”

“You?” Tintin asks. “ _You,_ the deafest person on two planets, heard a bottle breaking?”

“Don’t worry,” Calculus says, pulling out a stool next to his lab bench for Tintin to sit on. “I’d never say such a thing in front of the Captain. But if we can’t be ourselves with each other, who  _can_ we be ourselves with, don’t you agree?”

Tintin sits and pops his head off with a practiced motion as Calculus locks the laboratory door and pulls down the blinds. When he comes back over to the bench, Tintin hands his head to him for Calculus to mount on a metal stand. Calculus spins it in a slow circle, inspecting it closely, while Tintin pulls a white cord out of his pants pocket, and starts to untangle it. Calculus’ various machines hum comfortingly all around them.

“What is this in your hair?” Calculus asks, after a moment. “Is that…” He sniffs. “ _Whiskey_?”

“What else?” Inches from Calculus’ face, his lips quirk in a wry smile; behind them, on the stool, his hands continue to methodically untangle the white cord. “It… fell off, on the floor. Everything seems normal, but I still think you should take a look.” Tintin’s hands go still. “Cuthbert, he knows about me. He saw—he saw everything.”

Calculus spins Tintin’s head around to face away from him and presses a spot at the base of his skull. A small rectangular panel pops open. As Calculus probes it with a pair of small silver tweezers, Tintin’s hands jerk; the white cord, nearly all the way untangled now, falls to the floor. “Careful,” he says mildly. 

Calculus probes with the tweezers for another few moments, then straightens up and tucks them back into his pocket. “Well, everything seems to be in order,” he says. “Except for this whiskey in your hair.” He runs a white cloth under warm water and starts carefully cleaning Tintin’s head. “How much did he have, by the way?”

“I don’t know. He was drinking straight from a bottle of gin when I left him; you might want to check up on him later.”

“Why did you do it? You had to have known how dangerous it was. Anyone could have walked in at any moment. Not just the Captain—Nestor! The Thomsons! What about that horrible man, Wagg?! You know how he just lets himself in the front door whenever he feels like it. Who’s to say he wouldn’t have attacked you, had seen you in that state? You know what his kind does to people who are different.  _Jolyon_ , he calls himself…” Calculus clenches his fist, still holding the wet cloth; water drips to the floor at his feet. “It’s always the jolly ones. The ones with the big red faces and funny anecdotes for everyone they meet… As long as you’re who they want you to be, they’re all smiles, but the moment they find out you’re not…  Tintin, what were you thinking?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. I was with him from the moment I woke up. He forced me to go riding with him all day, then we went straight from the stables to dinner… I was down to .6% by the time the dessert arrived. It was either plug in or go dark.”

Calculus sighs. “It was bound to happen eventually. Couldn’t be helped, I suppose; although it could have been delayed… I would have counseled against _living_  with him, had I been there…”

“But you weren’t,” Tintin says. His tone is still mild—no reproach at all in it, like he’s simply stating a fact—but Calculus sighs again, burying his face in his hands.

“Tintin, I’m sorry,” he says. “We’ve never discussed this, I know. You were my masterpiece—the greatest achievement of both my personal and professional life… You were more than any word that exists to describe you. You were a living being, plain and simple, so alive it felt wrong to take credit for your existence! I wanted nothing more than to keep you with me, but I couldn’t. People were starting to talk. One of my colleagues at the university—he’d always had it out for me—starting spreading rumors that you were my lover… It was worrying, how readily everyone believed it. I thought we’d both be safer if we parted ways, but I never stopped thinking about you. I read every one of your articles, and with every one I read I worried more and more. I know you can take care of yourself, but maintenance-wise, there are some things you just can’t do on your own. Finally, after the meteor incident, I realized I had to act. You saw the lengths to which I was willing to go: hiding in a lifeboat for days on end, with nothing to eat but biscuits… You saw the fool I made of myself with that pendulum… Christ, that pendulum… There’s no better excuse for wandering off somewhere you’re not supposed to be, but one simply gets tired of playing the fool sometimes…”

“And after all that,” Tintin says, still in the same mild tone. “After all that, you told him about me? He said when he asked what you thought I did when no one was watching,” Tintin explains, when Calculus looks blank, “you said ‘He probably plugs himself in and recharges his battery.’”

“And did he believe me?”

“No,” Tintin says, after a pause. “He didn’t. He thought you were making a joke.”

“Well, there you have it. It just proves what I’ve been saying all along: everyone thinks I’m crazy, so no one listens to a word I say. What with that and the deafness, most of the time they act like I’m not even there. I can’t tell you how useful it’s been. People say all kinds of things when they think you can’t hear them. When we were in Borduria—”

“That’s all well and good,” Tintin says, exasperatedly fond, “but this isn’t about Borduria, and you know it. What about all that nonsense with Castafiore? The Bianca rose? What use is that to you?”

“You know exactly what use,” Calculus says stiffly, turning away. “You know the kinds of things people say about unmarried men—especially the kind of unmarried man who lives with his  _male friends_ on a secluded estate in the middle of the countryside. If I don’t put on a show like that every once in a while, people will start saying I’m—”

“And they’d be right!” Tintin cries. “What’s so terrible about that? I know what it was like when you were younger, Cuthbert, but times have changed. Who are you worried about? Snowy? The only creature on earth besides you that knows who I really am and loves me anyway?! General Alcazar? Word has it he’s about to be hauled up in front of an international court on sixteen different criminal charges—of all the things he has to worry about right now, your sex life is probably the last on his list. Nestor? He hates everybody who doesn’t have the last name ‘Bird,’ so there’s nothing you can do about that… Who else is there? King Muskar XII? Cutts the butcher? That Italian taxi driver with the ridiculously long name?!”

“Well, what about the Captain?” Calculus says. “Do you think he’ll accept me for who I am? Do you think he’ll accept  _you_?”

A thoughtful pause.

“The Captain probably thinks I’m the way I am because I’m… the way I am, after what he saw,” Tintin says slowly. “But I’m not. I’m the way I am because I’m  _me_. The Captain says everyone has something like it has to be something  _bad_ , but I’m never going to—I don’t know, have sex with someone who looks exactly like me except for the shape of their mustache, or something. He thinks I’m so, I don’t know,  _boring_ , but it just doesn’t take much to make me feel fulfilled! I like my work. I like hanging out here with you. I want the Captain to be happy, but I can’t be someone I’m not.”

“He just wants to feel close to you,” Calculus says. “Like he knows something about you that no one else does. Which he certainly does now, wouldn’t you say? I admit I had my doubts about him at first. He seemed so  _angry_  all the time; and then there was the drinking… Which seems to have gotten  _worse_ since the thing with the Picaros, not better, now that we’re on the subject… It’s revolting to him, but he drinks it anyway—and more than he ever used to. But he’s a good man, and he has a good heart. Sit there for just another minute, Tintin; I need to run one more test…”

“The Captain isn’t perfect,” Tintin says after a moment, “but like he says, who is? He’s my friend. My best friend in the world, besides you. Maybe it’s about time I tell him who I really am.”

Calculus snaps shut the rectangular panel on the back of Tintin’s head, spins it around one last time, then hands it back to Tintin. Tintin, with a pop, replaces it on his neck. They look at each other for a long moment. Then Calculus throws up his hands.

“I’m sick of hiding!” he cries. “Why should we have to live this way? The Captain, the Thomsons, even Cutts the butcher—they’re our friends! They’ll accept us as we are, and if they don’t? Then they don’t deserve us, and we’re well rid of them. Come on,” he cries, seizing Tintin’s hand and pulling him toward the door. “We’re going to have a word with the Captain.”

“Wait,” Tintin says. “He’s blind drunk. We should give it some time. We’ll talk to him over breakfast.”

But the Captain doesn’t come to breakfast. After half an hour of waiting, Tintin and Calculus go looking for him. They don’t have to go far. As soon as they step into the hallway, an acrid smell fills their nostrils; they follow it down the hall to the half-open drawing room door. “Captain,” Calculus cries, flinging it wide and striding purposefully into the room. “Tintin and I have something to tell y—”

They stop dead, staring. The Captain is sprawled on the couch, one empty bottle of gin lying on the floor beside him and another, half full, resting on his chest. His head lolls, mouth slightly open, vomit crusted in his beard. Tintin and Calculus stare for a moment, then spring into action. Calculus jumps on the Captain and seizes him by the shoulders, trying to shake him awake. “Careful of his head!” Tintin yells, flinging the white roses from a nearby vase to the floor and upending their water on the Captain. 

The Captain sits bolt upright, roaring with incoherent rage, then subsides back onto the couch, clutching his head. Tintin pours a glass of water from the tray above the liquor cabinet and presses it into Calculus’ hand; Calculus, despite the Captain’s sputtered protests, makes sure he drinks it all. The sickly-sweet perfume of the scattered Biancas fill the room.

“I hate those roses,” Calculus says, his voice shaking a little. “The first thing I’m going to do after—after this—is have every single one of them removed from the grounds. They smell like rotting teeth. Drink, Captain,” he says, tipping the glass up to make sure the Captain finishes every last drop. As he lowers it, the Captain sees Tintin and starts with surprise. “Tintin!” he croaks. “Oh, Tintin, I had the most terrible dream. I was shaking you—no, I was trying to  _uncork_ you—no, I’m getting it mixed up with something else—” He subsides onto the couch again, head in his hands.

“Tintin,” Calculus says. “He needs help. Things are far worse than we thought.”

“There’s a facility less than a day’s drive from here,” Tintin says. “We got a pamphlet from them in the mail last week; it put it by the phone… Call them, Cuthbert; tell them we’re coming. Tell them it’s urgent.”

“ _Cuthbert_?” the Captain croaks. “Since when do you call him  _Cuthbert_?”

“Come on,” Tintin says, slinging the Captain’s arm over his shoulders and helping him to his feet. “Up you get. We’ll explain on the way.”▼


End file.
